Hug the Monkey

Some call it love ...

James Kushiner of Touchstone Magazine comments on February's  National Geographic article about the biochemical basis of romance and love.  He doesn't seem to think it's useful -- or romantic -- to think about the underlying biochemistry of emotion. He writes,

Perhaps it helps even more than oxytocin to belong to a really big and loving family when all is said and done.

Neurochemistry is one of those things you don't notice  when it's working right.  But I think there's a growing percentage of people growing up without loving families for whom the oxytocin response isn't working right. For those of us, understanding our neurochemistries can be the first step in healing.

Evolution of Trusting Societies

Nicholas Wade of the New York Times writes about the genetic components of social behavior.  Reporting on a new analysis by Jonathan Pritchard of the University of Chicago, he writes:

Evolutionary changes in the genome could help explain cultural traits that last over many generations as societies adapted to different local pressures.

Pritchard found more than 700 parts of the human genome that have changed in recent times -- by evolutionary standards, at least. The average age of the changes was 6,600 years.

Some changes could be the result of diet, such as genes that allow the digestion of lactose, which became prevalent in inhabitants of what is now Sweden and Holland, where the practice of drinking cow's milk began.

But this rapid genetic change also can explain societal traits, Wade says, specifically the develoment of high-trust or low-trust societies.

Oxytocin levels are known to be under genetic control in other mammals.

It is easy to imagine that in societies where trust pays off, generation after generation, the more trusting individuals would have more progeny and the oxytocin-promoting genes would become more common in the population.

So, when we travel to a country or region where "the people are so warm and friendly," we may be experiencing a real genetic and biochemical difference.

UPDATE: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal has a discussion among people who know a lot about statistics, some of whom dispute the science in Wade's story.

 

Oxytocin and Eating

I was excited to find a clue to oxytocin's influence on eating -- and overeating. I felt intuitively that there's a connection, because food and love seem so connected.

Linda Rinaman  at the University of Pennsylvania presented  "Oxytocin and Ingestibe Behavior"  at that Neurohypophyseal Hormones Conference going on right now.  Building on research that showed oxytocin reduces rats' desire to eat when they're dehydrated,

Rinaman said she and her colleagues are interested in determining "the special role that [oxytocin] may have to control food intake under certain situations, but not in others. We think that oxytocin might normally act in the brain to inhibit intake only in certain types of feeding or drinking situations. If we can pinpoint the types of situations, we'll learn more about how [oxytocin] and other peptides may function under unique environmental conditions."

And who knew there was a Society for Ingestive Behavior ?

 

Friends are good for your health

David Kohn of the Baltimore Sun reports on research led by  Lynn Giles,  a professor at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. Giles found that found that people who had more friends and who spent more time with them tended to live longer.

The most interactive group, people who had five or more close friends and talked with them regularly, were 22 percent less likely to die than those who were least connected - no close friends and few social contacts of any kind, Kohn wrote.

Experts quoted in the article pondered whether the health benefits were due to getting off one's butt to see friends, whether friends encourage us to try harder, or whether those with more friends had healthier lifestyles in general.

A UCLA sociologist said,

"There's growing evidence to show that social experience can affect your biology."

I thought almost everyone accepted this by now.  Kohn goes on to say,

Some scientists suspect that social connection may trigger release of the neuro-hormone oxytocin, which can reduce blood pressure and anxiety.

Candace Pert, the neuroscientist who discovered the opioid receptors in the body, has a wonderful explanation of how oxytocin and other neuropeptides create health and homeostasis in our bodies. In her book, Molecules of Emotion, she talks about ligands, which are the neuropeptides like oxytocin that bind with receptors in the brain- and all over the body. She writes,

...These receptors and ligands have come to be seen as "information molecules" -- the basic units of a language used by cells throughout the organism to communicate across systems such as the endocrine, neurological, gastrointestinal, and even the immune system. Overall, the musical hum of the receptors as they bind to their many ligands ... creates an integration of structure and function that allows the organism to run smooth, intelligently.

In other words, oxytocin and other neurochemicals play roles all over the body, not just in the brain. So they're important for our allover health, as well as emotional health.

The study appears in the July issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

Oxytocin abuse?

The flurry of news stories about the Zurich study lasted all through last week.  (Google News logged 307, to be exact.)

A lot of them focused on the  angle that criminals could use oxytocin to get their marks to trust them, running headlines like "Oxytocin May Present Opportunities for Abuse" after one of the researchers admitted   to Joseph Verrengia of the Associated Press that someone sneaky could, for example, send oxytocin through the air conditioner ducts at an investors' conference and get everyone to put their money in a shady company.

"Of course, this finding could be misused," said Ernst Fehr ... . "I don't think we currently have such abuses. However, in the future it could happen."

Come on, Ernst. In the first place, it's unlikely that you could get enough oxytocin into a room and keep it there long enough to turn people into suckers. One problem with this hormone is that its effects don't last long.

Besides, unless the sleazebags were wearing gas masks, wouldn't they also come under oxytocin's effects, making them feel too good about their potential marks to go through with their nasty deal?

In any case, it's naive to imagine that people don't take advantage of the oxytocin response all the time without realizing it. What are salespeople told to do? " Build rapport with your customer." Great salespeople know instinctively how to create a sense of trust with their prospects, that is, how to get the oxytocin flowing, along with the norepinephrine of anticipation. When a man who's not interested in a relationship romances  a woman to get her to go to bed with him, he's abusing her oxytocin response. (I'm not being sexist -- this is a case where men's bodies don't work quite the same way as women's.)

It's natural for humans to interact in ways that build trust; we want to do it, because we're wired for it to feel good. As long as we don't lie, it's not abuse. And I don't think we'll have a chemical version of trust available for abuse any time soon.